bakamatt wrote:71 seats sold. And they've added a second showing Thursday the 17th. Which has 1 ticket sold.

Plus they moved the screening from the second largest theater to the first. I'm not sure if the second screening is entirely warranted but having options, especially on weekdays showings, is nice. If anyone is interested in more idol goodness, the AKB48 Janken tournament will start a few hours after the Tuesday showing.

bakamatt wrote:I also note screenings of the Attack on Titan the Movie parts 1 and 2 in October. Being almost wholly unfamiliar with the franchise, I don't know if these are animated or live action.

It's live action. The animated synopsis movies have yet to be announced by Funimation. I'm anxious to see which theater they put these in and the price. Seeing Love Live's $15 and Boruto's $12 ticket prices, it seems like premiere showings might stay at over $10.

116/197 sold for Tuesday and that's not counting at-door purchases. Should be pretty love lively. I wonder if they are going to have a special pre-show like they made for the Madoka showings. Don't forget to remind the staff to get your shikishi. I didn't get one at the Rebellion showing but not sure if that was b/c they forgot or if they ran out. I'm up for trading if it is the right girl.

Don't forget to remind the staff to get your shikishi...I'm up for trading if it is the right girl.

I don't know what this is.

They are giving out mini autograph boards for each of the nine girls with the purchase of a ticket. They should be given out at the ticket counter when you first arrive, so I wouldn't recommend printing your ticket and going directly to your seat. Besides, I like having the ticket stub from the theater rather than a self made printout.

That was worth doing. I'll have a bit more to say tomorrow when I'm not so tired, but, Brian, if you're curious, my parking validation didn't work. And thanks for trading me your Maki. She was one of my favorite Muse members going in, and I think she showed well in the movie and is now clearly my favorite.

I don't love anything about the Love Live! franchise. But I like a lot about it.

But, first things first. With only the one mandatory wrong turn downtown, easily recovered from and not troublesome as I allowed a lot of extra time, I made my way to the Alamo Drafthouse. Which is, if you haven't been there, a nice movie theater, however much it matters to you that a movie theater be nice. The seating is aggressively stadium, the don't-disturb-other-audience-members policy is stern, an advance ticket purchase gets you a reserved seat, and you can get real food at your seat, not just theater stuff, though it is pricey. (I didn't, so I can't speak to the quality.)

There was a before-the-movie program of shorts; ours included a Betty Boop cartoon (always welcome), a couple of old Bollywood music videos, old commercials and, most astonishing to me, a feature from a live-action trained-chimpanzee Saturday morning kids' show, that I watched as a Saturday morning kid, called Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp. For me that was practically worth the price of admission just by itself; a dose of unexpected and harmless weird can do a body a world of good.

Regarding the movie, as I said to Brian afterwards, "it'll do." It wasn't as much as the tenth-best anime movie I've ever seen, but I didn't begrudge it a bit. Like most anime movies that are explicitly intended to be a part of a series - the Cowboy Bebop movie, the Trigun movie - the best you can say about it is that it was more of the same; it made no significant contribution to the work as a whole. Furthermore, the Love Live! movie follows what was a fairly definitive end to the series, and it never stopped being kind of clumsy about that.

There's also such a thing as too much sincerity. I'm afraid I have a little trouble getting past lines like, "We'll show them the power of school idols!" I'm just a cranky old man, I guess. But enough kvetching, because I truly did have a good time.

The basic story is that Muse is called upon to help publicize the third Love Live! school idol competition, which is being held in a much bigger venue but is in danger of not selling out. This, apparently, would be a catastrophe. For reasons not made terribly clear, this involves Muse performing in New York, a sequence which occupies about the first third of the movie. There's a lot of fun stuff in here, much of it based on the cliche Japanese fears of what the U.S. is like. And at this point I'll mention a curious aspect of the movie - about half the musical numbers weren't Muse performing on stage, they were members of Muse suddenly bursting into song in some other context, making the movie less of a concert show and more of a musical. It's a difference that mostly makes no difference, but it struck me.

After the New York jaunt, the major plot complication is Muse having to deal with its new-found big-time success. At this point the members of ex-rival group A-RISE show up again; and the question of Muse's eventual fate, once seemingly settled, again becomes open. This was kind of interesting, making the New York sequence the most fun and the balance of the movie the most compelling.

We get only one new character of consequence, a mysterious Japanese singer who shows up twice to help out just when she'd badly needed. My suspicion is that she's actually Muse's

I've been trying to figure out why I'm as fond of the Love Live! franchise as I am; I'll buy it if it's available for a reasonable price, and the movie got me in the mood to go back and re-watch the series. Frankly, I'm sufficiently concerned about being thought a creepy old guy that I'm hesitant to even be a public fan, though the series is practically devoid of anything even suggestive. But having said that, how can I not like a series about a gaggle of cuties singing and dancing their hearts out, with just a smidge of drama mixed in? (I'd have liked Glee if it hadn't had that mean-spirited under-current, and I've watched A Chorus Line many times. But, hm, I never finished Kaleido Star.) And I've always been a sucker for determined anime girls when the cause they're fighting for isn't too harsh. But I think mostly it's that the world it's set in, like that of CardCaptor Sakura, is just such a gosh-darned nice place - bad things happen, but determination and the power of friendship get you past them.

And it's not like the franchise doesn't have a long pedigree, all the way back to child actors Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney piping up, "Let's put on a show!"

Khorosho! Final attendance was about 130 when I left home over and hour before the showing so it was close to a full house. As for the movie, it was definitely idols doing idoly things, which is what the audience wanted. It had added content from the series in contrast to a compilation film, but didn’t include any plot shifts or significant character progression. Going into it I thought it would be similar to the K-On! movie and that was cemented when they went overseas. I liked the breakout “unit” songs with the three of the first-year girls and third-year girls (not sure why they didn’t do second-year, time maybe, plus they sell themselves). Unit songs are a tactic often used in AKB, mainly because it’s tough to put 48 girls on one stage, much less the 400+ in AKB48G.

I will suggest that if Alamo hosts another similar screening like Love Live! or Madoka Rebellion where they give out swag with admission, get there at least 30 minutes before the showing. There were a few people that didn't get mini boards complaining to the staff after the show when I was trying to get my parking pass validated. Also, the H&R lot not longer just has their gate open after 6pm on nights that don't have a Sprint Center event. You have to get a ticket and have it validated for free three hours of parking. Also, assuming that Matt's experience was the same as mine, the ticket machine will say that it needs money after you feed in the pass, but then will just open the gate without you paying anything.

bakamatt wrote:Frankly, I'm sufficiently concerned about being thought a creepy old guy that I'm hesitant to even be a public fan, though the series is practically devoid of anything even suggestive.

The creepy feeling will wear off with more idol exposure. The average AKB fan seems to be a 50+ year old male. And when I say “wear off” I mean wear off for you, not for others. Granted I have no firm statistics to support it, but I would say Japanese people would find it much stranger for an older male to be into anime than idols.

I liked the breakout “unit” songs with the three of the first-year girls and third-year girls

Ah, so that's a thing they do.

You have to get a ticket and have it validated for free three hours of parking. Also, assuming that Matt's experience was the same as mine, the ticket machine will say that it needs money after you feed in the pass, but then will just open the gate without you paying anything.

Nope, the darn thing just sat there giving me the bird until I gave it my credit card, from which it dinged eight bucks. I guess that might be because I was there longer than three hours, or maybe it was timestamped "5:59 PM" instead of "6:00". I'm not going to lose any sleep over it; I feel too good about just successfully finding my way to the place and back home again.

When you learn how to drive in a town that was laid out after the invention of the automobile, getting around places for which that isn't true can be daunting.

Granted I have no firm statistics to support it, but I would say Japanese people would find it much stranger for an older male to be into anime than idols.

I aspire to something other than respectability by Japanese standards, but I'll take what consolation I can get.